Uprooted Palestinian

Uprooted Palestinians are at the heart of the conflict in the M.E Palestinians uprooted by force of arms. Yet faced immense difficulties have survived, kept alive their history and culture, passed keys of family homes in occupied Palestine from one generation to the next.

British media have singled out the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour party for relentless and unprecedented accusations of widespread anti-Semitism. The same media have almost completely ignored far more widespread and easier-to-prove prejudice in the governing Conservative (Tory) party. Occasional reports have not amounted to daily, hysterical attacks against the Tories, as is the case with Labour.

Former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s remarks about veiled women looking like “letter boxes” is the tip of a very large iceberg.[i] A few months ago, the UN Special Rapporteur on Racism, E. Tendayi Achiume, highlighted what she called “structural racism” at the heart of British society.[ii]

In 2015, ex-Tory advisor, Derek Laud (who is black), told British media, with specific reference to how the Tories treat the migration issue: “There is no other party better at pointing the blame their way than the Tories. They are the ultimate racists because they deal in stereotypes.”[iii] But Laud didn’t stop there. Referring to the treatment of black Tory candidate for west London, Shaun Bailey in 2010, Laud said: “They saw in Shaun a stereotype of what they wanted – black, presentable, committed. But as soon as he had served his purpose they dropped him.”[iv]

In 2016 (updated this year), the British union UNITE published a dossier of alleged and confirmed racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia within the Tory party. The report made no recommendations and states: “the Conservative Party is regularly beset by allegations of racism against its MPs, councillors and candidates. It’s also clear that only rarely do such instances – even when particularly offensive – result in the person being expelled from the Party.”[v]

In 2016, Dr Feyzi Ismail reported that the British Tory government was refusing to host an online petition to call for an inquiry into racism.[vi]

What follows is a chronology of allegations and confirmations of prejudice made against Tory politicians and councillors. Boris Johnson deserves a separate article of his own for the racist things he’s said and written. (For a Johnson compilation, see Chapter 2 of my book, The Great Brexit Swindle (2016, Clairview Books)). Years covered in this article are 2015 (when the Tories came into office) to the present.

April: The Limbury Mead Residents Page Facebook group run by candidate David Coulter posted in reference to Irish travellers: “Red Alert! Be aware the pikies have moved the car park at the shops [sic]. LOCK YOUR DOORS- GUARD YOUR VEHICLES. It is not politically correct, but be damned, they are thieving troublemakers and we need vigilance” (emphasis in original). Coulter denies writing it and said he personally deleted it.[viii]

April: Candidate for Derby Council, Gulzabeen Afsar, was suspended after saying she’d never support then-Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, whom she referred to as “the Jew.”[ix]

May: No action was taken when councillor Thomas Crockett of Maida Vale compared local youngsters to Hitler Youth.[x]

May: Following a police investigation, no action was taken after Leicestershire Cllr Bob Fahey referred to one colleague as “the Indian” and another as a “Chink.”[xi]

June: Dover District Cllr Bob Frost tweeted that a Big Issue (homeless magazine) salesperson should “fuck off back to Romania.” Frost said it was satire. (Frost has a history of posting racist abuse, or “satire”: calling rioters in London in 2011 “jungle bunnies” and Arabs “sons of camel drivers”).[xii]

September: Cllr for East Renfreshire, Gordon McCaskill, implied that refugees are terrorists when he tweeted that he wished to see those in Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon’s house reveal themselves to be “Daesh moles.” He was suspended.[xiv]

September: It was reported that Mike Kusneraitis, Cllr for Runnymede Borough Council, Surrey, posted numerous images, including a dog with a towel over its head, presumably in relation to Arabs or Muslims in general. Kusneraitis apologised and said he never meant to cause offense.[xv]

October: Cllr Jim Buckley of Rugby tweeted about Sadiq Khan: “Your next London Mayor? You think his corner shop would be open on a Saturday?” Buckley was suspended but later cleared of wrongdoing.[xvi]

December: Then-adviser to PM David Cameron, Oliver Letwin was exposed as saying in 1985 (when working for Margaret Thatcher) that black people had “bad moral attitudes” and that employment programs would see them move “into unemployment and crime.”[xvii]

February: Cllr for Trafford, Manchester, Matthew Sephton (who was later jailed on child abuse charges), posted a sarcastic leaflet aimed at the welfare state inviting foreigners to “consider moving to England, The Welfare Country,” which also implies that immigrants are scroungers.[xx]

April: Tory Cllr David Whittingham was stripped of membership and sacked from the Fareham North West council borough after he told housing officers he didn’t want any foreigners living near him (by foreigners, he meant non-whites). Whittingham was expelled from the party.[xxi]

April: Abdul Zaman, deputy chair of Bradford’s Conservative Association, implied that due his area being influenced by the Biradri system, Jews and Christians will be assimilated politically. He was suspended.[xxii]

August: Cllr Andrew Dransfield, vice chair of Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes’ fire authority, said to a black firefighter, “You’re the first one I’ve seen … [an] ethnic minority … Now all we need is a woman.” He was suspended.[xxiv]

2017

January: Cllr David Dean of Merton was re-admitted (in April) to the party after he allegedly said to a constituent of Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan: “as a white man … you will be a pariah in your own town. He will treat you like dirt.” Dean denies it.[xxv]

February: Cllr Alan Pearmain deputy chair of the South Ribble Conservative Association and Farington Parish Councillor posted a favourable comment about a tweet featuring Shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbott (who is black), as an orangutan. Cllr Pearmain describes himself on Twitter as “slightly to the right of Attila the Hun.”[xxvi]

April: Cllr Ray Bray of Shelley on Kirkburton Parish Council appeared to have published a series of tweets about “Muzzie rapists” and taxi drivers. When quizzed by the media, he said he could not remember whether or not he’d posted them. He then said that his twitter account was hacked. Bray was suspended.[xxvii]

May: Warwick District Councillor Nick Harrington was suspended after saying Ireland can “Keep your f’king gypsies! Hard border coming folks!” (his self-censorship). The Warwick District Council said that Cllr Harrington could not be sacked because he is an elected official and not an employee.[xxviii]

May: Michael R. Watson, Kirklees Cllr for the Denby Dale Ward was reported liking tweets, including pro-Nazi messages implying that “men” do not want big breasted women, but rather Nazi Aryan women. He was suspended.[xxix]

June: Following criticism of PM Theresa May over her seemingly indifferent response to the deaths of dozens of people in Grenfell Tower, Tory candidate for Coventry South, Michelle Lowe, tweeted a picture of Hitler and said sarcastically, “Politicians should go out and hug the public more. It proves they are nice people.”[xxx]

June: Gloucestershire County Councillor Lynden Stowe: “I think that some of Corbyn’s policies and the way he behaves are not dissimilar to some of the ways the National Socialist Party came about.” Calling Corbyn an anti-Semite, Stowe added: “In what he is trying to do with some of the younger people – it’s not dissimilar to Hitler Youth.”[xxxi]

July: MP for Newton Abbot, Devon, Anne Marie Morris, had the whip restored in December after she was briefly punished in July for using the anachronism, “Nigger in the woodpile” in relation to Brexit.[xxxii]

July: Tory Cllr Rosemary Carroll of Pendle Borough Council denigrated poor people, ethnic minorities and dogs by comparing poor minorities to dogs, tweeting that they “stink,” have never worked and are brown. Carroll was suspended and claims she shared the joke accidentally.[xxxiii]

August: It was reported that Stirling councillor Robert Davies tweeted of black people boarding a plane: “In the interests of security keep your loin cloths with you at all times. Spears go in the overhead locker.” Alastair Majury, Tory councillor in Stirling, tweeted jokes about Catholics: “Why is the Catholic Church against birth control? Because they’ll run out of children to molest.” Majury also called Catholics “tarriers,” an offensive term dating back to the Great Famine (1845-52). He also compared the Scottish National Party to Nazis. The Scottish Tories said: “Having served a suspension, both councillors have been readmitted to the party after offering unreserved apologies for any offence caused.”[xxxiv]

September: Jeff Potts of Solihull borough council in the West Midlands retweeted the comments of others, such as: “Deport and repatriate all muzlims [sic] from the UK or watch terrorists kill innocent people for generations to come” and, “You’ve clearly not experienced the Pakistani hospitality, having a daughter raped by men who think she’s ‘white trash’.” Potts was suspended.[xxxv]

October: Calls from opposition councillors mounted to suspend Solihull Cllr, Margaret Bassett, over retweets of some of Jeff Potts’ retweets relating to migration.[xxxvi]

November: MP Douglas Ross said of “Gypsy-travellers” that he would impose “tougher restrictions” on their movements and settlements.[xxxvii]

December: Teignmouth Cllr Robert Phipp was revealed to have liked a Facebook post by the far-right Britain First group featuring a covered dog and suggesting it could be a guide dog for blind Muslim women.[xxxviii]

December: It was reported that Cllr Eve Allison (who is black) filed a complaint against local Conservative bosses, accusing them of racism and sexism. She was sacked (a.k.a. deselected), meaning her application to stand for re-election was rejected.[xxxix]

2018

March: It was report that Derek McCabe of South Ayrshire council, who sits on the council’s equality and diversity forum, had posted jokes on Facebook denigrating poor people and black people.[xl]

April: It was reported that in 2013, Councillor Mike Payne of Sowerby Bridge, Calderdale, shared an article which described Muslims benefit recipients as “parasites.” Payne was suspended.[xli]

April: A scandal broke (Windrush) in which it was revealed that for many years, the Home Office (including under then-Home Secretary and now PM Theresa May) had a policy of denying citizenship to Afro-Caribbean-majority Britons, despite many and their parents having been invited to Britain in the 1960s to fill an alleged labour shortage. The Tory government had a policy of creating a “hostile environment” for migrants (or “illegal migrants”, as they claim).[xlii] Home Secretary Amber Rudd took the heat for May and resigned.

May: Rosemary Carroll (the councillor who shared on social media a joke comparing Asians to dogs) was re-relected.[xliii]

May: Baroness Warsi (Tory) expressed concern about Islamophobia in her party. No action was taken.[xliv]

June: Baroness Warsi again expressed concerns about Islamophobia in the Tory party, stating: “I think that there is a general sense in the country that Muslims are fair game and it is not the kind of community … you can treat really badly and have many consequences. You can get away with it” (sic).[xlv]

July: Warsi called for a full and independent inquiry into Islamophobia in the Tory party, stating that no action had been taken since her last public statements, adding that the attitude among Tories was “fuck the Muslims”.[xlvi]

Rayyah has lived in Khan al-Ahmar all of her 47 years. She raised nine children there, and 24 grandchildren; one more is on the way. Her family and neighbors, members of a Bedouin community known as the Jahalin, found refuge on this scorched patch of rocks and dust in the 1950s, after they were expelled from the land they had inhabited for generations, in the Negev desert, following the establishment of the Israeli state. The land Khan al-Ahmar stands on was under Jordanian control when the Jahalin arrived. Today, this smatter of tin roofs and tarps sits on the side of a highway in the occupied West Bank, surrounded by a fast-growing ring of Israeli settlements, which — while illegal — have become de facto suburbs of Jerusalem.

The village, which is home to less than 200 people and where the only building with walls is a school made of mud and old tires, has become the latest front line in a conflict over land that for decades has determined the fates of Palestinians like the Jahalin. Israel wants the village razed, its residents evicted, and their land annexed to its ever-expanding settlements. Khan al-Ahmar residents say they are not going anywhere and have been able to rally remarkable international support around their cause, delaying demolition through a yearslong legal battle that remains nonetheless stacked against them.

While Khan al-Ahmar’s plight is hardly unique, what is exceptional about the embattled community — which is surrounded by the illegal settlements of Kfar Adumim, Ma’ale Adumim, Alon, and Nofei Prat — is its position as one of the last-standing obstacles in the way of a decadesold plan to establish a contiguous Jewish presence between the West Bank and Jerusalem.

The interiors of homes in Khan al-Ahmar on July 26, 2018.

Photo: Samar Hazboun for The Intercept

On August 1, Israel’s Supreme Court confirmed an earlier ruling authorizing the village’s razing but temporarily delayed demolition, giving the Israeli government five days to come up with more suitable relocation plans than those it had previously offered — near a dump, and without any land the Bedouins could use to graze their animals.A day after the deadline, on August 7, the government proposed moving Khan al-Ahmar residents to temporary tents before relocating them again to a new site south of Jericho along with other Bedouin communities facing demolition — but only on the condition that they would leave Khan al-Ahmar voluntarily. Israel forcibly removed other Jahalin Bedouin communities in the late 1990s, and while violent evictions of individual Palestinian families have continued since then, Israeli officials have tried to steer clear of large forcible transfers — an ugly spectacle, as well as a war crime.

In a statement, Tawfiq Jabareen, an attorney representing Khan al-Ahmar, rejected the proposal, which he said proved that “the plan of the state of Israel is to evacuate all Palestinian Bedouin and move them near Area A,” closer to areas under the Palestinian Authority, “in order to expand the Jewish settlements in places that will be emptied of Palestinians.” Khan al-Ahmar residents have made clear that they have no plans to leave their homes, making forcible eviction a likely outcome.

“The Bedouins are used to being in the sun, they have lived their whole life in the sun. If Israel demolishes their homes, they’ll stay here anyway,” Eid Abu Khamis, Khan al-Ahmar’s leader, told The Intercept. “If they put up a boundary — a meter away from it, this is where all the women and all the children of the community will stay.”

“If the children die from the heat, I didn’t demolish their homes, they did.”

The outside of a Palestinian Bedouin house in Khan al-Ahmar on July 26, 2018.

Photo: Samar Hazboun for The Intercept

A Strategic Wedge

Israeli authorities routinely demolish homes built without permits — which are nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain — and often use demolitions as collective punishment against the families of Palestinians who attempt attacks against Israelis. In July, Israel demolished a daycare and a women’s community center in Jabal al Baba, another Bedouin community outside Jerusalem, as well as several homes in the village of Abu Nawwar, near the illegal settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, leaving 64 people, mostly children, homeless.

Map: Soohee Cho

But Khan al-Ahmar sits in a uniquely strategic position close to what Israel refers to as “E1” — an area it intends to expand to create spatial continuity between the West Bank settlements and Jerusalem. So far, those plans have mostly stalled following international pressure, but advocates fear Khan-al Ahmar’s demolition will be the first step toward implementing that plan, which would further fragment Palestinian areas, isolating Palestinian-majority East Jerusalem and splitting the occupied West Bank in half.

In the 1970s, when Israel expropriated the area surrounding Khan al-Ahmar, Uri Ariel, a founder of the Kfar Adumim settlement and today the country’s minister of agriculture and rural development, made no secret the move was part of a plan to establish “a Jewish corridor from the sea, through Jerusalem, to the Jordan river, which will put a wedge in the territorial continuity of Arab inhabitation between Judea and Samaria” — the names used by Israel to refer to the occupied West Bank.

“This is a particularly strategic wedge because it’s in the narrowest part of the West Bank, and because it will complete the process of isolating East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank,” said Amit Gilutz, a spokesperson for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, pointing to Khan al-Ahmar on a map dissected by an intricate pattern of current and planned separation barriers and settlements, and Palestinian areas under various forms of Israeli control.

“It’s fragmenting the society itself,” he added, noting that Israel can easily control isolated Palestinian enclaves by blocking access to their entrance and cutting them off entirely. “From a control perspective, that is very efficient, because if you want to disconnect their access, all you need is a military jeep. You put the thing on the road and that’s it.”

Israeli workers place container houses near the town of Al-Eizariyah in the occupied West Bank on July 9, 2018, to absorb residents of the Palestinian Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar, who are set to be evicted.

Photo: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images

The plan to force the Bedouins out so the settlements can expand is hardly a secret: In May, days after a court largely made up of settlers upheld demolition orders against Khan al-Ahmar, the Israeli government approved the construction of a new neighborhood in Kfar Adumim, “reaching 500 meters from my home,” Abu Khamis told The Intercept.Israel argues that Khan al-Ahmar’s school and homes are illegal because they were built without permits or an approved zoning plan — hiding behind a façade of legality the reality that Palestinians have virtually no access to either, and that what is illegal is the Israeli occupation of their land. Since it occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967, Israel has declared 347,000 acres of occupied territory — nearly a quarter of the West Bank — as state land. But 99.7 percent of the state land Israel has allocated for public use so far — some 167,000 acres — has gone toward the development of illegal Israeli settlements, the watchdog group Peace Now recently learned through a public records request. A meager 0.24 percent of that land was allocated to Palestinians.

After the Oslo Agreements, in the 1990s, the West Bank was divided into Areas A and B, which are under the limited control of the Palestinian Authority, and Area C, under exclusive Israeli military control. While the arrangement was supposed to be temporary, Israel has effectively treated Area C as its expansion grounds — and some 400,000 Israelis live in illegal settlements there, protected by the military. With Palestinian chances of obtaining building permits in Area C “slim to none,” according to analysis by B’Tselem, most have given up on the process altogether.

There are more than 150 Palestinian communities in Area C without zoning plans and therefore at constant risk of expulsion, including 12 — some 1,400 people — around Khan al-Ahmar, according to B’Tselem. But while Bedouins living in the area around Jerusalem are particularly vulnerable, similar efforts to cut off Palestinian areas of the West Bank are also underway in the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills. “What Israel wants and has been striving toward very consistently is maximum land under its control, minimum Palestinians on it,” said Gilutz. “For the most part, Israel has been creating this coercive environment, trying to force people off of their land as if by their wish, while avoiding the textbook example of a forcible transfer, which is clearly a war crime.”

Palestinian Bedouin men sit together in Khan al-Ahmar on July 26, 2018.

Photo: Samar Hazboun for The Intercept

“They Want to Scare Us”

Israeli efforts to make life in Khan al-Ahmar so difficult that its residents leave of their own volition started when the nearby settlement of Kfar Adumim was built in the early 1980s. The settlers took over areas the Bedouins had used to graze their animals. If sheep or donkeys wandered into the settlement, settlers would take them and sell them back to the Bedouins, Rayya said last month, surrounded by some of her daughters and grandchildren. “If we went too close, they started shooting.”

Rayyah spoke to The Intercept from her home — three shacks of tin, tarps, and scrap wood she shares with her large family. Like many Palestinians in Area C, Khan al-Ahmar residents are not allowed to put up new structures or bring in construction material, so when Rayyah’s sons got married or new children were born, everyone squeezed into the structures they had already built, even though they, too, are subject to demolition. “If I put something up, they’ll come and destroy it,” she said, adding that a drone flies over the village every day, photographing anything new that residents may have built.

Recently, Israeli officials came into the village and confiscated solar panels that an aid organization had donated. Then last month, they came in with bulldozers and leveled the areas between tents and huts into a dusty road that residents speculate will be used by the army when it comes to drag them away. Tensions flared that day, and several residents, including an 18-year-old girl, were arrested. Since then, the Israeli military has kept a close eye on the village. “We can’t sleep. Maybe they’re not doing anything, but their presence there, it’s creating tension,” said Rayyah. “They come because they want to make us leave, they want to scare us.”

Palestinian Bedouin children at the school in Khan al-Ahmar on July 26, 2018.Photos: Samar Hazboun for The Intercept

Rayyah was particularly worried about the school, which a group of Italian volunteers built in 2009 with the help of kids from the village, who painted their classrooms with hand prints and drawings of books and flowers. Before the school was built, children from Khan al-Ahmar would leave at 6 a.m. and walk on the highway waiting for rides, or trek to schools in Jericho. “It was very difficult for them,” said Rayyah. “They’d have to wait in the sun for a long time.”

Israeli authorities have destroyed or confiscated at least 12 Palestinian school buildings since 2016, and 44 Palestinian schools, including Khan al-Ahmar’s, are currently at risk of demolition, Human Rights Watch found. Over a third of Palestinians living in Area C don’t have access to primary schools and are not allowed by Israeli authorities to build any — leaving 10,000 children to attend schools in tents or other temporary structures with no heat or air conditioning.

But the mud walls of the school in Khan al-Ahmar — a sign of permanence — bothered neighboring settlers, and shortly after it was built, representatives of Kfar Adumim and the pro-settlement group Regavim petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to enforce earlier demolition orders against the village. As the Supreme Court first upheld and then froze authorization to demolish Khan al-Ahmar, life in the small community carried on between hope and fear, while delegations of activists and Palestinian and foreign officials made trips to visit.

Eid Abu Khamis, center, speaks during a press conference in Khan al-Ahmar on July 26, 2018.

Photo: Samar Hazboun for The Intercept

In July, addressing several foreign diplomats under a large tent in Khan al-Ahmar, Saeb Erekat, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, called Israel’s plans to demolish the village and evict its residents “ethnic cleansing.” “You begin with evicting and demolishing the community of Khan al-Ahmar, and one day you may destroy Dura, Jericho, parts of Ramallah,” he added, referring to some of the West Bank’s most populous cities.Bedouins live largely removed from the rest of Palestinian society, and it took some time for Palestinian leaders to take on Khan-al Ahmar’s cause. “Lately they have woken up,” said Abu Khamis, adding that Israel’s plan to dissect the West Bank would effectively put a nail in the coffin of Palestinian plans to build a state there. “They understand that if this corridor is built, then their government is over.”

To Rayyah, talk of a Palestinian state in the West Bank seems far removed from the reality at hand — the only home she has ever known slated for demolition, and her 24 grandchildren facing displacement.

“We have faith. Without faith we can’t go on,” she said. “We’re going to pray. And we’ll stay.”

Top photo: Rayyah washes dishes at her home in the village of Khan al-Ahmar on July 26, 2018.

Attacks against Objects Indispensable to the Survival of the Civilian Population

Article 54(2) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I provides:

It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out

Tuesday, 14 August 2018

On August 9, a U.S.-supported Saudi airstrike bombed a bus carrying schoolchildren in Sa’ada, a city in northern Yemen. The New York Times reportedthat the students were on a recreational trip. According to the Sa’ada health department, the attack killedat least forty-three people.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, at least twenty-nineof those killed were children under the age of fifteen, and forty-eight people were wounded, including thirty children.
CNN airedhorrifying, heartbreaking footage of children who survived the attack being treated in an emergency room. One of the children, carrying his UNICEF issued blue backpack, is covered with blood and badly burned.

Commenting on the tragedy, CNN’s senior correspondent Nima Elbagir emphasized that she had seen unaired video which was even worse than what the CNN segment showed. She then noted that conditions could worsen because Yemen’s vital port of Hodeidah, the only port currently functioning in Yemen, has been under attack for weeks of protracted Saudi coalition-led airstrikes. Ms. Elbagir described the port of Hodeidah as “the only lifeline to bring in supplies to Yemen.”

“This conflict is backed by the U.S. and the U.K.,” Elbagir said, concluding her report with, “They are in full support of the Saudi-led activities in Yemen today.”

U.S. companies such as Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin have sold billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other countries in the Saudi-Emirati-led coalition which is attacking Yemen.

The U.S. military refuels Saudi and Emirati warplanes through midair exercises. And, the United States helps the Saudi coalition warmakers choose their targets.

Isa Blumi, an associate professor at Stockholm University and author of the book Destroying Yemen, has saidthe United States is “front and center responsible” for the Saudi coalition attacks.

Looking for a helpful way to describe U.S. support for the Saudi-Emirati operation in Yemen, journalist Samuel Oakford recently offeredthis comparison: “If an airstrike was a drive-by and killed someone, the U.S. provided the car, the wheels, the servicing and repair, the gun, the bullets, help with maintenance of those—and the gas.”

The August 9 attack against children and other civilians follows a tragic and sordid list of Saudi-Emirati attacks causing carnage and extreme affliction in Yemen. On June 12, Doctors Without Borders reportedan airstrike which destroyed its newly constructed facility for treatment of cholera, in the town of Abs, built in anticipation of a third epidemic outbreak of cholera in Yemen.

Scores of people were killed and wounded in an August 3 attack near the entrance to the port of Hodeidah’s Al Thawra hospital. Analysts examining the munitions used in the attack believethe killing and destruction was caused when United Arab Emirates forces situated near the Hodeidah airport fired mortars into the area.

Why have the Saudis and Emiratis led a coalition attacking Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab peninsula, since March of 2015?

Professor Isa Blumibelieves the goal is to bludgeon Yemenis into complete submission and exert control over “a gold mine” of resources, including oil reserves, natural gas, minerals, and a strategic location. Blumi notes that the war against Yemen costs the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 200 million dollars per day, yet Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who commented that a prolonged war is in the interests of Saudi Arabia, seems to believe the cost is worth it, considering potential future gains.

Business profits seem to also motivate U.S. weapon companies that continue benefitingfrom weapon sales to the Saudi-Emirati led coalition.

The United States is deeply implicated in the appalling carnage in Yemen. It is our responsibility as citizens to do what we can to demand an end to this complicity.